Man Booker prize winner Eleanor Catton touring four Canadian cities

Author of The Luminaries scheduled at book festivals in Calgary, Vancouver, Windsor and Toronto starting Saturday,

Eleanor Catton is coming to Canada Saturday for her first book festival tour since winning Man Booker Prize for The Luminaries.

By:Dianne RinehartBook Reporter, Published on Thu Oct 17 2013

Eleanor Catton is living in five-minute intervals in the lead-up to her first book tour — coincidentally of her homeland Canada — since winning the coveted Man Booker prize for her 832-page book, The Luminaries.

Five minutes each is how long her British publisher is allotting for the seemingly endless day and night media interviews that have ruled her life since Tuesday when — at 28 — she became the youngest winner ever in the 45-year history of the award.

It gives Catton just enough time to talk briefly about her “out of body experience” of winning, where it took “a while for my mind to catch up with what my body was feeling” — but only because she is adept at speaking quickly.

When you’re life is time-slotted so intensely that you’re giving interviews by phone from the back of cars, Saturday may seem like an eternity away. But it’s only a blink away from her “shocking” win when she will land in Calgary, stop one of four-city tour of book festivals that will bring her to Vancouver, Toronto — for three events at the International Festival of Authors — then Windsor for a fourth IFOA event.

“I’m really looking forward to that,” Catton says of her trip to Canada in a phone interview from her U.K. publisher’s office in London.

She’s been back to Canada on occasion, since moving to New Zealand at the age of 6 — most recently on a book tour after her first novel, the ironically-in-retrospect named, award-winning The Rehearsal, was published in Canada in 2010. And she was here earlier on visits with her family, and kept “the Canadian connection” alive when friends from Canada visited her family in New Zealand, too.

“The connection with Canada has been alive my whole life, but it’s more alive now because of friendships I’ve made” with other authors on her book tour for The Rehearsal and with the staff at her Canadian publisher, McClelland & Stewart, she says.

Though Windsor is just down the highway from her birthplace of London, Ont., Catton isn’t sure she’ll get a chance to drop by and see her former home because of the tight scheduling planned by her publisher. “Personal pilgrimages?” she asks. “No time.”

Still she’s looking forward to her time in Toronto for the festival. It’s a city she says she has really connected with. She compares it to Chicago, her partner’s hometown. Except “Toronto is a cleaner, friendlier version of Chicago,” she says. “It’s Chicago without the underbelly.”

Catton, who only finished The Luminaries in January of this year, says she hasn’t even begun to think of her next project. “I like the feeling of being emptied out, the feeling I had when I had finally handed in the last piece,” she says of book which took her five years to write — two years of thinking it through after The Rehearsal was published, and three years of intense work.

The book, which takes place during New Zealand’s late 19th-century gold rush, has been lauded for its complex structure, but Catton says she didn’t set out to “write a complex novel.

“I was interested in setting myself a series of challenges to push myself into new creative territory. The book taught me how to write it as I went along,” she says. “When you begin you don’t have the skills to carry you to the end of a book, but the book teaches them to you. You learn along the way.”

Meanwhile, this may not be Catton’s last tour of Canada for The Luminaries. The book is also shortlisted for a Governor General’s Literary Award. The winners in the GG’s literary categories will be announced in Toronto on Nov. 13, and the winners are expected to attend the press conference and the awards ceremony at Rideau Hall on Nov. 28th.

Catton says “I was so thrilled to get that good piece of news,” when she was nominated for the GG. Though her Canadian citizenship makes her eligible for the award, she was worried that the fact the book is set in New Zealand might “have been enough to have the judges feel this is not a Canadian book.”

Still, the GG’s and a possible win are a long way off for someone living their life in five-minute sound bites. For now she’s simply looking forward, she says, to “a week in Toronto.”

Other young superstars

Eleanor Catton’s history-making win as the youngest author to ever receive the Man Booker Prize this week shone a spotlight on young achievers.

Here are 10 more who inspire:

1. James Asquith: In October 2013, at age 24, Asquith became the youngest person to visit every country in the world.

2. Lawrence Bragg: In 1915, Bragg was 25 years old when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics together with his father "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays". Bragg is the youngest Nobel Laureate in any Nobel Prize category.

3. Louis Braille: Between the ages of 12 to 15, Braille perfected a system that allowed the blind to read and write. He published his system in 1929, at age 20.

4. Annaleise Carr: In 2012, Carr became the youngest person to swim across Lake Ontario at the age of 14.

5. Frederic Chopin: In 1818, at age 8, Chopin plays his first public piano performance, having already composed two polonaises (G minor and B flat major) at age 7.

6. Karen Connolly: In 1993, at age 24, Connelly became the youngest winner of the Governor General's Award for non-fiction for her book about Thailand Touch The Dragon. The book went on to become a national bestseller, remaining on bestseller lists for almost two years.

7. Wayne Gretzky: In the 1981-82 hockey season, at age 21, Gretzky set a record for most goals in a season — 92. He is also second on that list with 87 goals in the 1983-84 season.

8. Teodor Johansen: In 2011, at the age of 20, Johansen became the youngest person to successfully traverse Antarctica, a total distance of 1,665 km.

9. Jennifer Lawrence: In 2013, at age 22, Jennifer Lawrence won an Academy Award for Best Actress. Later in the year, after she turned 23, she was named the second-highest paid actress in Hollywood ($26 million U.S.).

10. Malala Yousafzai: In 2013, at age 16, Yousafzai, an advocate for girls' education and the target of a Taliban assassination attempt, became the youngest ever nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

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